The Rise of the Midde Class: Addison, Steele, and Daniel Defoe
Background:
 Focus on man as an individual;
 appearance of modern journalism;
 industry of printing, publishing and bookselling (Grub Street);
Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele responsible for the periodical essay (quality, not hack writing)
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educated gentlemen from respectable families who both studied in Oxford;
both supported by the Whig magnates who had early allied themselves with the Middle Class;
Whig patronage brought them lucrative public employments: Addison held high government offices,
and Steele was employed as the editor of the London Gazette (official government newspaper appearing
twice weekly);
The Tatler (April 1709 to January 1711, three times weekly): started by Steele with contributions by Addison
The Spectator (March 1711 to December 1714, published on every day of the week except Sunday): a joint
enterprise of the two but dominated by Addison.
The essays address a wide readership: cheap, one-sheet format, brief essays, easily readable (to tattle: ‘to gossip;
to talk idly, chat’), especially recommended for female readers, for the breakfast table of the whole family, for
coffee houses.
Their aim:
- to educate their (chiefly middle class) readers: to improve their morals and manners;
- to achieve a kind of balance between the serious morality and respectability of the old Puritanical
middle class and the wit, grace, enlightenment, elegance of the old aristocracy (without its libertinism);
- to present a new social ideal: moderation, reasonableness, self-control, politeness, good taste;
- to achieve their moral purpose in a light and entertaining manner:
Addison in Spectator 10: “Since I have raised to myself so great an audience, I shall spare no pains
to make their instruction agreeable, and their diversion useful. For which reasons I shall endeavor
to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality (…) It was said of Socrates that he
brought philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it
said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and in coffeehouses.”
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issues taken from everyday life,
lightly ridiculing social types (the coquette, the prude, the toast, the rake, the critic, the “pretty
fellow”),
never offensive or hostile.
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In The Spectator there is a focus on a set of recurring characters: Sir Roger de Coverley (country
gentleman) and Sir Andrew Freeport (merchant), which paves the way for the novel that also focuses on
characters;
- Addison’s literary criticism (on Milton’s Paradise Lost);
Addison and Steele were successful as playwrights: Addison’s Cato, Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722).
The birth of the novel
Antecedents: Elizabethan drama, Bacon’s essays, English edition of Theophrastus’s Characters (1592),
historical works (Clarendon), John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman (1680), Mrs. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688).
Daniel Defoe - Lower middle class origins, his father was a small merchant, a Presbyterian dissenter;
- Defoe was sent to dissenting school and then to the Newington Green Academy for Dissenters: solid
practical education;
- Set up as a businessman: successful initially but in 1692 he suffered his first bankruptcy;
- A very eventful life: involved in business, in politics, in political writing; many times imprisoned for
debt and for his writing;
- His two most famous political pamphlets: The True-Born Englishman, The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters;
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Released from prison by the intervention of Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford: he served the Tories as a
spy and as a political journalist;
The Review: a three times weekly Tory newspaper (1704-1713).
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- immediate success of the novel (forerunner: Alexander Selkirk);
- yet something entirely new in Defoe: realistic fiction:
o hero is an ordinary man (middle class);
o detailed events such that could happen to any one of us (probable – no recourse to the
supernatural);
o manner of narration: 1st person narrative;
o Crusoe’s completeness of character (e.g. powers of observation, deduction and moralizing
tendencies);
o through his experience an account of the most important economic, social processes of the
period (the rise of modern capitalism, economic individualism, colonization, slave-holding
etc.);
o optimistic outlook: a balance between individualism and the moral ideal of the middle class;
o myth of the European middle class man (e.g. Robison Crusoe’s father describing the
advantages of belonging to the middle class to dissuade his son from adventures:)
He ask'd me what Reasons more a meer wandring inclination I had for leaving my Father’s House and
my native Country, where I might be well introduced, and had a Prospect of raising my Fortunes
Application and Industry, with a Life of Ease and Pleasure. He told me it was for Men of desperate
Fortunes on one Hand, or of aspiring, Superior Fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon
Adventures, to rise by Enterprize, and make themselves famous in Undertakings of a Nature out of the
common Road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the
middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life, which he had found by long
Experience was the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness, not exposed to the
Miseries and Hardships, the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanick Part of Mankind, and not
embarass'd with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind. He told me, I
might judge of the Happiness of this State, by this one thing, viz. That this was the State of Life
which all other People envied, that Kings have frequently lamented the miserable Consequences of
being born to great things, and wish'd they had been placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, between
Mean and the Great; that the wise Man gave his Testimony to this as the just Standard of true Felicity,
when he pray to have neither Poverty or Riches.
He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the Calamitles of Life were shared among the upper
and lower Part of Mankind; but that the middle Station had the fewest Disasters, and was not expos'd to
so many Vicisitudes as the higher or lower Part of Mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many
Distempers and Uneasiness either of Body or Mind, as those were who, by viscious Living, Luxury and
Extravagancies on one Hand, or by hard Labour, Want of Necessaries, and mean or insufficient Diet on
the other Hand, bring Distempers upon themselves by the natural Consequences of their Way of Living;
That the middle Station of Life was calculated for, all kind of Vertues and all kinds of Enjoyments; that
Peace and Plenty were the Hand-maids of a middle Fortune; that Temperance, Moderation, Quietness,
Health, Society, all agreeable Diversions, and all desirable Pleasures, were the Blessings attending the
middle Station of Life; that this Way Men went silently and smoothly thro' the World, and comfortably
out of it, not embarass'd with the Labours of the Hands or of the Head, not sold to the Life of Slavery
for daily Bread, or harrast with perplex'd Circumstances, which rob the Soul of Peace, and the Body of
Rest; not enrag'd with the Passion of Envy, or secret burning Lust of Ambition for great things; but in
easy Circumstances sliding gently thro' the World, and sensibly tasting the Sweets of living, without the
bitter, feeling that they are happy, and learning by every Day's Experience to know it more sensibly.
(Robinson Crusoe, Ch.1.)
Bernard Mandeville and the problem of middle class ethics:
– a Dutch physician who settled in London;
– he published fables in verse, among them, The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest (1705);
– 1714: reprinted with prose commentary: The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits;
– what Mandeville draws attention to is an inherent contradiction in middle class attitudes.
While Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe handles this inner contradiction successfully and optimistically, in his later
novels the problem comes more and more into the foreground. (e.g. Moll Flanders (1722).